Anne Wayne

<img src="http://www.mg.co.za/ContentImages/199502/Zim_icon.GIF" align=left>Birgit Kidd is having lunch with her torturer. The 60-year-old still bears scars from the attack by agents of the Central Intelligence Organisation, the feared Zimbabwean security police, last year. Despite a dislocated shoulder, cuts requiring 16 stitches, and severe bruising to her knee, the diminutive blonde activist has not been cowed into submission.

<img src="http://www.mg.co.za/ContentImages/199502/Zim_icon.GIF" align=left>"It was 4am on Tuesday and opposition candidate Iain Kay was driving to his hometown near Harare. Two rallies had been planned. But by the time the sun had set, the police had detained more than two hundred people and Kay had returned to the interrogation centre where he had been tortured last year. The MDC still faces violence and intimidation, but, for now at least, it refuses to stay silent.

Maggots are squirming from the old man’s foot, but he is just laughing at the ceiling. The latest patient to enter one of Bulawayo’s main hospitals has suspected beri-beri, a disease caused by vitamin deficiency. He is also mentally ill, and seems undisturbed at the prospect of having his foot amputated due to the gangrene that has set in. But you can’t even get a Band-Aid these days from a system that was once top grade.